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Alone in Berlin (Penguin Modern Classics) |  | Author: Hans Fallada
Creator: Michael Hofmann
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Category: Book
List Price: £9.99
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Rating:  122 reviews
Sales Rank: 53
Media: Paperback
Pages: 608
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5 x 1.2
ISBN: 014118938X
EAN: 9780141189383
ASIN: 014118938X
Publication Date: January 28, 2010
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Its Berlin, 1940, and the city is filled with fear. At the house on 55 Jablonski Strasse, its various occupants try to live under Nazi rule in their different ways: the bullying Hitler loyalists the Persickes, the retired judge Fromm and the unassuming couple Otto and Anna Quangel. Then the Quangels receive the news that their son has been killed.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 122
 A brilliant, page-turning moral thriller set in wartime Berlin March 1, 2009
Gilgamesh (London)
123 out of 127 found this review helpful
This novel is nearly impossible to put down. It's an incredibly moving, gripping story based around an ordinary couple who, after the death of their only son at the front, decide to resist the Nazi regime - if only in a small, mainly symbolic way. For me its power comes from the rough, raw style - it was written in just a few short weeks shortly after the War - and the unfamiliar yet utterly believable events that eventually overtake each character. Subtly translated by the award-winning Michael Hofmann, it's a novel not to be missed if you've any interest at all in what it must have been like to live through the War in the heart of Germany.
Hardcore reading experience January 28, 2010
Mr. R. Ellor (Salford, United Kingdom)
36 out of 38 found this review helpful
Others will write reviews giving a synopsis, so I will concentrate on impressions.
This is hardcore reading at its very best. I initially threw this book into a corner as it took me to a world where I did not want to spend time. The sinister, drab and brutal Nazi society in which this novel is set is reminiscent of the very worst Communist dictatorships where the Party is all and anyone could be an informer. The translator has to be congratulated as this is a book where not a single word is wasted. Characters are built up with supreme skill and economy, putting the reader exactly where they should be with believable but not stereotypical individuals.
The translation of this novel conveys the story with the perfect balance of the bleak and the gripping. That is why I came back to it, because it genuinely did draw me into that uncomfortable world of 1940s Berlin where sacrifice was considered a virtue and to rebel could mean death. One of those books that is essential in a personal collection as it will imprint on your memory long after you have read it, but do not expect an easy read or one you can leave incomplete once you make a start.
Alone in Berlin - a rivetting and terrifying story October 11, 2009
Stuart Money (England - Cornwall)
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
This is a rivetting story, almost impossible to put down once started. It comes across as a factual picture of an utterly drab, but sinister city under wartime conditions, where life is one of repression and fear under the all pervasive Nazi rule throughout Germany. It focusses not on the ruling elements or on the persecuted victims of Nazi atrocities, but on ordinary people trying to survive and eke out a living in an atmosphere of suspicion, betrayal and increasing hardships.
Alone in Berlin is a terrifying account, told by a master of narrative skills. He builds up the tension to breaking point, leaving the reader drained and in despair of the suffering an evil regime san inflict on its powerless people.
Extraordinary how this classic lay unpublished for over sixty years. At least it now is available to complement the many historical accounts of the War and the atocities committed against the peoples of countries overrun and brutalised by Hitler's regime
Criminals and other Germans August 24, 2009
Friederike Knabe (Ottawa, Ontario Canada)
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
It is difficult to imagine the impact of Hans Fallada's novel on his German contemporaries in 1947. In the years immediately following World War II, hardly any fiction authors who had remained in the country throughout the Nazi regime were even considering the raw topics of the very recent past because they were more concerned with the shaping of the "new" Germany. Yet Fallada, in his characteristic way of observing and writing about the "little people" *), for which he had been widely read before the war, was bursting with everyday stories of the struggles of working class people of the early forties. For him, writing was like an addiction that enabled him to pen the novel in a mere 24 days.
In the fall of 1945, the author came upon a thin Gestapo file on the case of an elderly working class couple and their private futile attempt at stirring resistance against the regime. To honour their memory and to ensure that their suffering was not in vain, Fallada placed Anna and Otto Quangel, as he called them, into the centre of his novel about the struggle for survival of the "little people" during the early war years. He surrounded his heroes with a small, yet diverse and representative group of Berliners, most living in an apartment block in Berlin's working class north. Creating believable characters and vivid scenarios, he conveyed a series of reality snapshots of the social and political conditions of the time. There was the misery of poverty and the constant fear of being denounced, conscripted to the army or sent to a concentration camp for not obeying the orders that controlled people's daily lives. Having experienced much of this himself, Fallada also exposed the internal workings and competing forces within the regular police force, the Gestapo and SS, the judiciary and the prison system.
Fallada writes in the language of his characters using different levels of Berliner dialect to reflect their social standing and level of education. While this makes for a very lively dialogue, it can at times seem long winded and cumbersome. Yet, it represents the spirit of the time exquisitely. With the flow of the story's events, the reader is pulled into a combination of intense action and drama alternating with detailed descriptions. At times it reads like a thriller; at others it is a series quiet reflections by his main characters or detached observations by the narrator. Fallada's depiction of the evolving and deepening relationship between the couple, Anna and Otto,is probably one of the most moving aspect of the story; the description of the trial in contrast is the most disturbing.
While in prison Otto reflects that everyone, including himself, function as the nuts and bolts of the brutal system, as the smaller or larger wheels that make the machine work. Some just go with the flow; others try to benefit and take advantage of it. Some are natural brutes or obsessed with power; only a few are willing to risk acting like the grit that clogs the machine and remain, despite the numerous pressures, "decent human beings".
More than sixty years later, Fallada's novel has not lost its relevance: it opens a unique window on the living conditions of ordinary people during the early 1940s. It is also an authentic record of the political and social panorama of those brutal times. For me it has answered questions that have lingered since my youth and I wish I had read the book decades ago. I read the novel in German and while I admire Hoffman's outstanding in translations in general, I believe it is close to impossible to convey the nuances of language of this story in English or any other language. This linguistic challenge notwithstanding the now translated work is an important and fascinating historical record. [Friederike Knabe]
*)Little Man, What Now?
A beautifully crafted novel April 5, 2009
Dr. Raymond Randall (UK)
33 out of 36 found this review helpful
This is a wonderful read, it evokes the claustrophobic and repressive atmosphere of an evil totaliterian state, where nevertheless,decency blooms but is inevitably overwhelmed. The characters are superbly drawn and believable, the plot is tight and the writing is of a high calibre.I would really recommend this book.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 122
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